I don't think movies can ever be too intense, but people have to understand why you're showing them the things you are showing them.

I've never been one of those guys who storyboards every frame, because that would take away some of the mystery and some of the fun.

I am a story-teller working with a craft. My job is to use my craft - which is a different thing to my race - and tell a story well.

As a filmmaker I find it much more rewarding to work with actors who are classically trained. It's about the work and only the work.

What is a scientist after all? It is a curious man looking through a keyhole, the keyhole of nature, trying to know what's going on.

The resistance to black-and-white is huge, in the way that you have to sell the film. It's difficult to distribute around the world.

Violence and nonviolence are, after all, two different forms of theater. They both depend and thrive on the response of an audience.

But ambition is a funny thing: it creeps in when you least expect it and keeps you moving, even when you think you want to stay put.

But I am a girl with a keen interest in having it all, and what follows are hopeful dispatches from the frontlines of that struggle.

The movie theater is never going away. If that was a case why are there still restaurants? People still have kitchens in their home!

Destiny doesn't control your life, but it does place you on a path. It's how you walk down that path that determines stories I tell.

When you make a documentary film, after many years the only thing you remember is what you put into the film, not what you took out.

I often joke that I straddle psychosis and neurosis, and that being an artist keeps me in the middle, so I can work between the two.

My childhood had its challenges, like everyone's. It imbued me with certain things and took away others. It made me very determined.

There are two types of people: you have people that like psychological horror and you have those that like everything in their face.

Work eight hours a day for a living and many more hours a day making movies and you'll work all your life to be a success overnight.

My grandfather was a very mystical guy who travelled from Argentina to Chile, across the mountains with a donkey, carrying the Torah.

America is a huge country, of course. It's complicated. There's good, and there's not so good, and that's the same wherever you live.

Sometimes in the studio movies I've been working in, you'll put a joke in a movie because the crowd loves it - not because I love it.

A lot of the issues of rhythm in film are found in the editing because it's very rare that any sequence is the sequence that is shot.

The questions of economics, and how they infect, or rather how they affect intimacy. And that's probably the subject of all my films.

Me and music are not good friends, so I do my best to augment the music part [of my films] and come up with something worth watching.

We are the measure of all things. And the beauty of our creation, of our art is proportional to the beauty of ourselves of our souls.

There is no other way to break the frozen cinematic conventions than through a complete derangement of the official cinematic senses.

I graduated from high school with the art award and I had made a ton of short films, but it was before DVDs with director commentary.

The key thing is that you start every film from sort of a blank page, almost like you discover it like a child discovers a new world.

There's been almost a dozen films that have been made against me. There's actually more films made attacking me than films I've made.

I realized that this was the big secret of democracy -- that change can occur by starting off with just a few people doing something.

Republicans are relentless and they're smart, too - they're not all dumb - and on Election Day, they'll be up at five in the morning.

Sometimes people ask me, 'Are you an optimist or a pessimist?' It doesn't matter. Whether I have a future or not is for me to decide.

I remember as a kid not ever wanting to have friends around to my house because it was, for want of a better description, disheveled.

For me, making films is about trying to work something out by myself in quite a lonely way. I find the whole thing very lonely really.

These movies are like my kids. I just love them to death. Some of them go to Harvard and some of them can barely graduate high school.

When you're in a fight, and you get hit, it hurts. And as you get older, you begin to take on the aches and the bruises of doing that.

I learned a lot doing 'Wolverine,' and I was also very fortunate, in the sense that I got to do a huge number of visual effects shots.

Some scenes comes together really quickly, and some scenes are disasters that take forever. But it sort of works itself out over time.

I think about my best friendship - which the Marnie-Hannah friendship in Girls is based on - as like a great romance of my young life.

Post-war filmmakers gave us the documentary, Rob Reiner gave us the mockumentary and Moore initiated a third genre, the crockumentary.

I can't single out one thing that influenced me. My generation was influenced greatly by the manga that came out during our childhood.

I gotta tell you, I don't have many close friends, and if I do wind up making friends with somebody, it takes me a long time, usually.

I always thought that I was lazy because I could never tell if I was working or not. I was making things, which doesn't seem like work.

The big difference between us and other people who produce content is that we started doing this to make things that we wanted to make.

I'm not very well organized unless I'm plugged into a structure like the opera or a movie. When I'm doing that, I have to be organized.

I am profoundly fascinated by cruelty, fear, horror and death. My films show my preoccupation with violence, the pathology of violence.

I'm really glad to have made a movie that way on Superbad, because I learned a lot about what can be done and what the limitations are.

Buoyed by water, he can fly in any direction - up, down, sideways - by merely flipping his hand. Under water, man becomes an archangel.

It's such a rich experience when you enter into a subject from a documentary point of view. It's hard for fiction to compete with that.

Okay, 'Best Party Ever' -- to me, that's like saying 'Best Gym Ever' or 'Best Nature Documentary Ever,' like how good can it really be?

I don't compromise my values and I don't compromise my work. That's why I've been kicked from one network to the next: I won't give in.

Corporate conglomerates run without regulation do not work in the service of society, and run reckless and unchecked whenever possible.

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